The Bubbles

I decided it was time for me to post something humorous, so here's an embarrassing moment from my past. Enjoy.

Was this what a tension headache was?  I guess I’d never had a real one before.  We’d just taken Mandi to the airport.  The glorious cross-country trip we’d planned together was over.  Finally. Apparently tacking a trip like that onto the end of a semester was bad for me.

“Why don’t you go take a bath?  They have a hot tub, you know,” my mom suggested.

“Yeah,” chimed in our friend Paralee, at whose home we were spending the night, “make it a bubble bath.  There’s nothing more relaxing.”

At this point I was ready to try anything.  With some help, I found a towel, and Paralee showed me how to work the hot tub and pointed out where the bottle of bubble bath solution sat.  I was ready.

I played with the temperature, making it just hot enough that when I started to climb in I had to ease myself in slowly.  I watched as the water level rose up the side of the tub.  Now it was at the bottom of the jets.  Now the middle.  Now they were covered; time to relax between the pounding streams of air and bubbling water.  Wait, bubbles!  Paralee had said I should use bubbles, and I hadn’t had a bubble bath since I was a little kid.  Gleefully, I poured a small stream of lavender-scented bubble mixture into the steaming water.  Then, thoughtlessly, I pushed the button to turn on the hot tub jets.

Think back to the last time you took a bubble bath.  Remember the thick clouds of foam, which you stuck to your chin for a beard and put in your hair so you could be Santa Clause?  Remember how when your mom poured in the bubble liquid, you beat your arms and legs spastically in the water to make the bubbles as big as possible?

Within five seconds, the bubbles were up to my chin.  In ten, I was fighting them away from my mouth and nose, trying to get them off my face while at the same time trying to hold the growing mountain from spilling out of the tub.  I pictured the headlines: “19-year-old girl smothered by lavender bubble-bath.”  Frantically, I turned off the hot-tub jets and began shoving bubbles under the water, trying to drown them. 

After about five minutes, I managed to reduce the pile to a size which allowed me to breathe without threat of suffocation.  I sat back in the water and contemplated the remaining bubbles.  I lifted my hand under a two-inch pile, bringing it toward my face and studying the way the bubbles clung to one another.  Then I clenched my fist around the pile and thrust the bubbles under the water, watching them fizzle into nothing.

Five minutes later I had managed to subdue the remaining bubbles.  Looking at the water, I gloried in my total triumph over my foe.  Then, stupidly, I reached once more for the button which would activate the hot-tub jets.

When I stumbled from the bathroom fifteen minutes later, shaking and on the verge of tears, my mom and Paralee stared at me.

“What happened?” my mom finally asked.

“The bubbles ate me.”  I shuddered, and, without further explanation, retreated to the cushion on the floor on the corner—my bed—and curled up in the fetal position, where I stayed until dinner.